If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Sounds to me that your Bios is in need of an update. Ok try this reboot your computer then when prompted to hit the F2 key in there you can reconise your hard drive or attempt to change the size of the hard drive. If that doesnt solve it try you need a new bios chip or OS. also try useing win2000 that might do the trick it worked for me. I had NT and it didnt show my entire HD so I installed 2000 and that solved the problem.

In the docs that came with the drive, or on a sticker on it,
there should be the drive Geometry in cylinders, heads,and
sectors. In a perfect world, your BIOS setting would
accurately reflect this geometry. The PC BIOS has been
improved/hacked several times to keep up with the size
of hard drives, and drives report a "fictional" geometry
to the BIOS. Check for bios settings like LBA, logical block addressing.
Most recent BIOSs hav no trouble automatically recognizing big
drives, but some may need upgrading.
Is this drive a lot bigger than what you had before?
How old is your BIOS?

Remember also that drive sizes are often quoted Unformatted... I have two 20GB hard drives on my Windows 2000 system, and once formatted I have 18.5GB free space (because the file tables take up space on the disk!) So, i'm losing around 2 GB on a 20 GB, so that'd be around 4 on a 40GB, plus the other 4 from the post above:

you should have 36 or 37 gigs because of the number games that manufacutures play with their advertisment.

If you have exactly 32 gig, then I would wager you're using windows 98 or ME, which uses FAT32 partitions, which is limited to 32 gig.

Check your disk management, and see if there is additional free space you can format.

My supposedly 40 gig drives format with 37.2 gigs each under windows 2000, so there is some inherant loss due to what really should be considered false advertising. (40 billion bytes, not 40 gigabytes)

I was under the impression that FAT32 was limited to 2TB (terabytes), not 32 GB... I could be wrong, of course, but my memory of such facts is usually quite reliable!?

If, however, it is Windows 98 and ME themselves that are limited to 32GB, and not the FAT32 file system, then i don't understand how that can be the case, but I accept it since Windows 2000 has problems with 20GB NTFS partitions as the second drive (any drive other than IDE Primary Master), so I have to run my second 20GB HDD as an 8.2GB, NTFS Formatted, until I have sufficient time to download Windows 2000 Service Pack 2.

Heh, good idea!
I would write a tutorial, but I only know about the software side of hard disks (partitioning, formatting, file systems etc) and the basics of the hardware (i.e. where to plug it in, what settings to set from master, slave, primary, secondary etc.) but I don't know all the details about hard drive geometry and cylinders, sectors and stuff.

Advertiser Disclosure:
Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.